THE DECISION WASN'T HIS TO MAKE

Years ago, one of my guys called me from a tower site.

He told me there had been an osprey nest on the tower and he had removed it.

Someone nearby had been recording what was happening. One of the people watching had spoken to the guy on the ground and told him she was going to contact the Department of Natural Resources.

He climbed down and called me.

I could hear it in his voice. He was already shook up.

My response was immediate.

“STOP Who said you could remove it?”

“Nobody.”

He assumed the tower owner knew the nest was there and that because we were there to work on the tower, removing it was something he was allowed to do.

It wasn't.

I was working at another site when he called. We immediately stopped what we were doing and went over there.

By then, this wasn't just a problem at one tower anymore.

The DNR became involved. The tower owner became involved. While the situation was being resolved, we were no longer allowed to perform work on that owner's towers in the market.

One decision on one tower had now reduced the number of sites our company could work.

The situation got ugly.

One of the first directions we received was to gather the nesting material that had been removed and place it in bags at the bottom of the tower. There was discussion about having us rebuild the nest.

While the phone calls, emails, and meetings were taking place, the birds started rebuilding the nest themselves, so ultimately, we didn't have to reconstruct it.

But the incident didn't end there.

The employee was suspended. We had meetings. We held a safety meeting about what happened. Our escalation and notification expectations became clearer, and our employee handbook and company procedures were strengthened around encounters like this.

It would have been easy to put all the responsibility on the person who removed the nest.

I don't think that would have been accurate.

He owned part of it.

He encountered an abnormal condition and made a decision he hadn't been authorized to make. He should have stopped and called before touching anything.

Management owned part of it too.

Maybe we had a chain-of-command policy at the time. If we did, we hadn't taught it well enough for him to recognize where his authority stopped.

I don't remember how much our handbook said about migratory birds before that incident. If there was a policy, it wasn't adequate for what our crews were encountering.

That mattered because our operating environment had changed.

In some areas where the company had traditionally worked, tower nests weren't something crews encountered very often. In other markets where we were working, particularly around large bodies of water, they were much more common.

The territory had changed.

Our training needed to change with it.

That doesn't excuse the employee's decision. But management can't assume somebody understands the seriousness of a condition simply because management understands it.

To him, it may have looked like a bunch of twigs that needed moved so he could do his job.

Years later, we pulled up to another site at a water tank.

Before we ever got started, we could see a nest and bird activity on the structure.

That was enough.

We got out of the truck, took pictures, documented what we were seeing, sent the pictures to management, and left.

There was no attempt to remove anything. No assumption that because we were scheduled to work there, we had the authority to disturb the nest.

Someone at the appropriate level could determine what needed to happen next.

While we were there, the elderly woman who lived next door came outside.

She asked us:

“Are you here to get rid of those birds? They keep stealing my cats.”

After everything I'd learned about osprey nests over the years, that was a new one.

I don't know who eventually went back and completed that site.

It wasn't us.

What I remember is how different the response had become.

The first time, somebody saw an obstruction and made a decision that wasn't his to make. That one decision reached far beyond the tower. It involved the DNR, the tower owner, our company, our available workload, our policies, and our training.

Years later, we saw essentially the same kind of condition.

We took pictures.

We notified management.

We left.

The first incident changed more than our policies and training. It changed how I looked at field authority.

The second showed me that the lesson had become part of how we worked.

Sometimes experience isn't knowing what to do.

Sometimes it's knowing when the decision isn't yours to make.